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That peculiar disease of intellectuals, that infatuation with ideas at the expense of experience, that compels experience to conform to bookish expectations.

Archibald MacLeish

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Archibald MacLeish
Age: 89 †
Born: 1892
Born: May 7
Died: 1982
Died: April 20
Lawyer
Librarian
Playwright
Poet
Poet Lawyer
University Teacher
Writer
Glencoe
Illinois
Atheism
Compels
Disease
Infatuation
Experience
Intellectuals
Ideas
Expense
Conform
Expenses
Peculiar
Expectations
Bookish

More quotes by Archibald MacLeish

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We are as great as our belief in human liberty - no greater. And our belief in human liberty is only ours when it is larger than ourselves.
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Journalism is concerned with events, poetry with feelings. Journalism is concerned with the look of the world, poetry with the feel of the world.
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Freedom is the right to one's dignity as a man.
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Young poets are advised by their elders to avoid the practice of journalism as they would wet socks and gin before breakfast.
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The perversion of the mind is only possible when those who should be heard in its defence are silent.
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Man can live his truth, his deepest truth, but cannot speak it.
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Poets... are literal-minded men who will squeeze a word till it hurts.
Archibald MacLeish
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The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself.
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What is more important in a library than anything else-than everything else-is the fact that it exists.
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How shall freedom be defended? By arms when it is attacked by arms, by truth when it is attacked by lies, by faith when it is attacked by authoritarian dogma. Always, in the final act, by determination and faith.
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Democracy is never a thing done. Democracy is always something that a nation must be doing. What is necessary now is one thing and one thing only, that democracy become again democracy in action, not democracy accomplished and piled up in goods and gold.
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The one man who should never attempt an explanation of a poem is its author. If the poem can be improved by it's author's explanations it never should have been published, and if the poem cannot be improved by its author's explanations the explanations are scarcely worth reading.
Archibald MacLeish
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Love becomes the ultimate answer to the ultimate human question.
Archibald MacLeish
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America is promises to take! America is promises to us to take them.
Archibald MacLeish
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History, like a badly constructed concert hall, has occasional dead spots where the music can't be heard.
Archibald MacLeish
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Poetry is the art of understanding what it is to be alive.
Archibald MacLeish
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A Poem should be palpable and mute As a globed fruit.
Archibald MacLeish
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There is no dusk to be, There is no dawn that was, Only there's now, and now, And the wind in the grass.
Archibald MacLeish
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A poem should not mean but be.
Archibald MacLeish
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You burned the city of London in our houses and we felt the flames.
Archibald MacLeish